Posted on by TracyC

The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat

The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat by Thornton W. Burgess, 1914.

This book is part of a series of stories about the adventures of different animals.

Jerry Muskrat lives with his family and friends in the Smiling Pool and Laughing Brook, near the farm owned by Farmer Brown. Jerry’s mother warns him to look out for the traps that Farmer Brown’s son likes to set, but he’s sure that he can take care of himself . . . until he has a very narrow escape!

Jerry’s mother calls a meeting of the other animals to discuss the threat of traps after Jerry’s close call. They decide to ask Great-Grandfather Frog for his advice. He tells them that they must find all of the traps and use a stone or stick to trigger them. Then, when the traps have been sprung, they will bury them. The animals have some close calls while springing the traps, but they manage to set them off successfully.

However, they soon have a new problem: it seems like the water in the Smiling Pool is getting lower each day. When the animals investigate, they discover that someone has dammed the Laughing Brook that feeds the Smiling Pool! If they don’t do something about it, they might all have to go live on the Big River, and they don’t want to leave their home.

It turns out that the dam was made by Paddy the Beaver, Jerry Muskrat’s “big cousin from the North.” Jerry tries to make a hole in the dam so that the water will flow, but Paddy blocks it again, telling them not to mess with his dam. Jerry has to explain to Paddy why the residents of the Smiling Pool need the water. Once Paddy understands, he lets the water flow again.

The animals in the story refer to the place where they live in terms of their pool and brook and the nearby farm. You don’t really know exactly where they live, but there is one animal who has a Southern accent, “Ol’ Mistah Buzzard.” Ol’ Mistah Buzzard talks like the characters in Disney’s Song of the South, regularly dropping phrases like, “Where are yo’alls going?”, “Fo’ the lan’s sake! Fo’ the lan’s sake!”, and referring to other animals as “Brer Mink” and “Brer Turtle.” The book was written before the movie Song of the South was created in 1946, but long after the book that the movie was based on, Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris from 1881. I suspect that the author of this book was inspired by the animal stories in Uncle Remus and that the Buzzard’s dialect is a salute to that. Unfortunately, that kind of dialect is really annoying for modern readers and may make it a difficult thing to read aloud to children. Mercifully, none of the other characters in the book do this. The parade of animals who hurry to find what has stopped the water in the brook is also a take-off from The Tortoise and the Hare story because the turtle, who was left behind by the others in their rush does become the first to find the source of the problem when the others stop to rest.

This book is over 100 years old and in the public domain now. There are multiple places to read this book for free online, but the one that I recommend the most is Lit2Go from the University of South Florida because it offers audio readings of the chapters in the book as well as the text. The book is also available online through Project Gutenberg.

Posted on by TracyC

The Turret

The Turret by Margery Sharp, 1963.

Miss Bianca has decided to resign as Madame Chairwoman of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society.  She has never felt particularly drawn to public life, really preferring her quiet life as a pet of an Ambassador’s son (whom she always calls “the Boy”), keeping him company during his lessons and writing poetry in her spare time.  During the times when she is away from the Boy, undertaking rescue missions for the society, she knows that the Boy pines for her and worries about where she is.  She has started to feel a little guilty that she might be neglecting her Boy.

Bernard, the Secretary of the society, actually feels a little relieved by her decision to resign.  While he thought that she made a great chairwoman, he has always worried about the dangerous nature of their missions, afraid that something might happen to Miss Bianca.  (Miss Bianca is a little annoyed that he seems so eager for her to resign, and his comment that “you’re too beautiful to be allowed into deadly peril” makes a weirdly chauvinistic compliment – like it would be okay for her to risk her neck if she were ugly because it would be less of a loss? – but Miss Bianca takes it in the spirit in which it seems to be offered.)  The two of them reminisce about some of their past missions.  Bernard thinks that the worst villain they’ve faced was the head jailer in the Black Castle (from the first book in the series), but Miss Bianca thinks that the worst was Mandrake (from the last book) because the target of his cruelty was a defenseless child.

The society plans to throw a special dinner for Miss Bianca, and Miss Bianca suggests that she would like a picnic by water.  The ideal place for it would be the moat around an old tower outside of the city.  Miss Bianca enjoys the picnic and is fascinated by the crumbling old turret.  Then, she notices something white in the window.  Thinking that it’s a piece of litter, one of the mouse boy scouts goes to retrieve it.  It turns out to be a small piece of linen, and after the boy scout takes it, it’s replaced by another.  Miss Bianca comes to the conclusion that there is someone in the turret and that the person could be a prisoner, signaling for help.  When she studies the scrap of linen more closely, she also realizes that she knows who the prisoner is because it has the name Mandrake on it!

After the events of the previous book, the evil Duchess had Mandrake locked in the turret.  To Bernard, it sounds like a just punishment for Mandrake, but Miss Bianca feels a responsibility to rescue him, in the hope that he might reform.  However, Bernard is skeptical about that possibility, thinking that they would just be letting a criminal lose if they tried to free Mandrake, and Miss Bianca is unable to persuade the other members of the society to undertake the mission.

However, Miss Bianca is unable to give up on Mandrake and goes to see him in his turret. Mandrake is a shadow of his former self.  She introduces herself to him as a member of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society, and it turns out that he’s heard about it from friends of his who have been in jail (having had many disreputable associations over the years).  In order to test how likely Mandrake would be to reform, Miss Bianca asks him what he would do if he were freed from captivity, and he says that he’d like to be a gardener at an orphanage.  He feels badly about the child slaves he helped to abuse while serving the Duchess, and he’d like to see children happy, making their garden a beautiful place.  Miss Bianca is satisfied with this and sets about planning his escape. (She’s free to undertake this mission because her Boy is having his tonsils out and won’t miss her for awhile.)

At first, Mandrake doesn’t know how people even bring him food, since his room in the turret doesn’t seem to have a door and food just seems to arrive during the night.  Miss Bianca stays up at night to see what happens and learns that there is a hidden staircase in the turret that his jailers use.  Before Mandrake can escape, though, he needs to be stronger because he’s badly under-nourished.  Miss Bianca recruits the mouse boy scouts to bring him vitamins to help make him healthier and tries to figure out how the secret passage works and think of some way to create a distraction so that Mandrake can escape.

Shaun, the leader of the boy scouts, helps her to come up with a plan.  (The book says that Shaun is half-Irish and thinks of himself as being a “handsome boy-o.”  Stereotypical.)  Shaun has figured out that the jailers watching Mandrake are actually grooms by trade, and he knows of a race horse, Sir Hector, who could provide a good distraction for them.  Miss Bianca approves of the plan and persuades Sir Hector to help them.

Meanwhile, the members of the Prisoners’ Aid Society are getting fed up with their strict new chairwoman, who only seems interested in forcing them to participate in group exercises.  Members are starting to avoid going to meetings, and worse still, someone suggests to Bernard that the bossy chairwoman particularly likes calling committee meetings because she’s in love with him and wants the excuse to see him. The thought horrifies Bernard, but he’s afraid to say anything to Miss Bianca because he doesn’t want her to feel obligated to try to become the chairwoman again in order to solve the society’s problems (or his), not knowing what she’s actually been up to in her free time.

In the end, everything works out well.  When Mandrake is rescued, he actually does become the gardener for an orphanage.  The members of the society find out Miss Bianca’s daring mission, undertaken with just a handful of boy scouts, and feel badly that they didn’t take part.  They complain to the new chairwoman that she was just wasting their time with exercises instead of real missions, and she resigns, saving Bernard from her attentions.  Miss Bianca does not return to the society as its chairwoman, but the next chairwoman is more competent.

This is the third book in the Rescuers series, and it is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Miss Bianca

Miss Bianca by Margery Sharp, 1962.

Miss Bianca is still a hero to the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society after the rescue of the Norwegian poet in the last book.  Bernard is a lesser hero, even though he was part of the mission, but such is the lot the organization’s Secretary.  Since the success of the rescue mission, the society is keen to perform another rescue, a deviation from the society’s usual role of merely providing comfort to prisoners.  The rescue mission that they have in mind this time is that of a little girl.  (The first Disney The Rescuers movie also featured the rescue of a little girl, but the circumstances in the book are very different.)

Patience is an eight-year-old orphan who has been abducted and enslaved by the Grand Duchess and is being held in her Diamond Palace.  The Grand Duchess is cruel, and some people think that she’s a witch.  Miss Bianca appeals to the Ladies’ Guild of the society to help free Patience.  The Ladies’ Guild doesn’t usually take part in the more exciting missions of the society.  The mice are somewhat concerned about what they will do with the child once they have rescued her because other prisoners they’ve helped have had homes to return to, but Miss Bianca assures them that they have a home in mind for the girl, a farm family in Happy Valley who have lost a daughter and would be likely to take in another girl.  The Ladies’ Guild agrees to undertake the mission.  Bernard wanted to come, too, but Miss Bianca insisted that they didn’t need his help.

The Diamond Palace is a strange place, in many different ways.  People often come to see it because it looks like it’s made out of diamonds, although it’s actually rock crystal.  It’s cold all the time, but even weirder than that, there seem to be less servants in the Palace than Miss Bianca would expect, given that the Duchess is always surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, who would be expected to have maids of their own.  It turns out that the “ladies-in-waiting” aren’t real people – they’re clockwork automatons! 

Rather than being a witch, the Duchess is simply an odious person who has so much money that she can give full reign to a nasty personality without anyone stopping her.  She’s so nasty and spoiled and used to forcing people to do what she wants that all of her previous, human ladies-in-waiting found that they just couldn’t handle her increasingly unreasonable demands, like insisting that they all stand perfectly still all day long while she sits on her throne, not even the slightest movement allowed.  No human being could possibly manage that.  When the human ladies-in-waiting all fainted after trying to keep perfectly still for forty-eight hours straight, the Duchess screamed that they all must have done it on purpose and dismissed them, replacing them with automatons.  The mechanical people are almost perfect because they always stand perfectly still until they’re needed and never complain or have human needs, but the Duchess discovers that they’re not quite perfect because there are some chores that they can’t do and she also misses seeing people react fearfully or start crying when she bullies them.  Keeping Patience as her slave gives the Duchess someone to do those chores and also someone to abuse.  The Duchess has had other child slaves before, but the others have died from the abuse, ill-nourishment, and general bad treatment.  (This is a darker story in a lot of ways from the Disney one.)

When Miss Bianca and the other mice meet Patience, she is also under-nourished and desperately lonely.  Miss Bianca sends the others back to the society to report about the automatons and stays with Patience to keep her company, trying to decide how to deal with the strange, mechanical people.  Bernard worries anxiously about Miss Bianca when the others come back without her and decides to go after her.

The Duchess’s other human servant, Mandrake, her Major-domo, is also little more than a slave.  The Duchess has evidence of a crime that he once committed and uses it to keep his loyalty.  Usually, he’s the only one who gets to go out the back door because he doesn’t trust Patience to take out the garbage without running away.  However, Patience tells Miss Bianca that the clockmaker sometimes comes in that way when he comes to wind up the mechanical ladies-in-waiting.  Miss Bianca hatches a plan that involves making the ladies-in-waiting break down.

However, to Miss Bianca’s surprise, the Duchess commands Mandrake and Patience to come with her to her hunting lodge when the ladies-in-waiting break down.  There is no opportunity for escape.  However, it turns out that the hunting lodge is actually above Happy Valley, and Bernard knows where it is.

Of course, they do get Patience safely to her new foster family.  Miss Bianca actually talks to the girl’s foster mother and tells her that Patience will probably forget about her eventually, when she grows up, but the foster mother likes the lullaby that Miss Bianca sings for Patience and promises to keep it as a family tradition.

The darker aspects of the story really bothered me, and I have to admit that I didn’t like it as well as the Disney version.  Mandrake actually reappears in another book in the series.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Rescuers

The Rescuers by Margery Sharp, 1959.

This is the first book of The Rescuers Series.  Disney made a movie called The Rescuers based on this series, but the movie was very different from the book.  The movie involved a pair of mice who were members of a mouse version of the United Nations called The Rescue Aid Society who rescued a young orphan girl who was kidnapped for the purpose of recovering a treasure from a dangerous cave.  In the book, the prisoner the mice rescued was a poet who was being held captive in a castle.

The beginning of the first book of the series explains the purpose of the Prisoners’ Aid Society, an organization of mice that helps human prisoners:

“Everyone knows that the mice are the prisoners’ friends – sharing his dry bread crumbs even when they are not hungry, allowing themselves to be taught all manner of foolish tricks, such as no self-respecting mouse would otherwise contemplate, in order to cheer his lonely hours; what is less well known is how splendidly they are organized. Not a prison in any land but has its own national branch of a wonderful, world-wide system.”

However, the mice are daunted by their latest concern, a prisoner who is being held captive in the Black Castle, a Norwegian poet.  The Black Castle is a harsh prison, and because of the jailer’s cat, mice usually cannot reach the prisoners there.  However, the current chairwoman of the society believes that it may be possible to rescue one of the prisoners there.  She thinks that Miss Bianca is just the mouse for the job because she is the pet of an ambassador’s son and will soon be traveling to Norway with her owner.  The chairwoman sends Bernard, a pantry mouse, to Miss Bianca to recruit her for the mission.

Miss Bianca is frightened when Bernard explains the mission to her and faints.  However, it turns out that Miss Bianca is a poet, and so is the man who is being held prisoner.  Bernard uses her sympathy for a fellow poet and some flattery to inspire her to agree to help.

When Miss Bianca reaches Norway, she recruits some help from the mice in the cellar of the embassy.  In particular, a sailor mouse called Nils accompanies her to where the other mice from the Society are meeting.  There, Bernard joins them for the journey to the Black Castle.

When they reach the castle, Miss Bianca, Bernard, and Nils take up residence in an empty mouse hold in the head jailer’s quarters.  (There is a horrifying description of how the head jailer apparently pinned live butterflies to his walls to die. Ew!)  The jailer does have a horrible cat named Mamelouk, who is as cruel as his master.  At first, Miss Bianca isn’t afraid of the cat, having known a nice cat who didn’t eat mice when she was young.  After talking to Mamelouk and interacting with him, she comes to recognize his cruelty and real intentions toward her.  However, Mamelouk is an important source of information.  It is from Mamelouk that they learn that the jailers will be having a New Year’s Eve party soon and that many of them are likely to be lax in their duties.  This will be the best time for them to try to rescue the poet!

The mice do successfully rescue the poet, and Miss Bianca returns to her boy, who has been missing her. However, this is just the first of her adventures in this series!

Overall, I prefer the first Disney Rescuers movie to the book because the prison/castle seemed pretty dark for a children’s book, and I think the idea of rescuing a child is also more appropriate for a children’s book.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Arthur’s Valentine

Arthur’s Valentine by Marc Brown, 1980.

During the week before Valentine’s Day, someone keeps leaving unsigned valentines for Arthur.  He wonders who it is, thinking about the different girls in his class at school. On the other hand, maybe someone is just playing a joke on him.

When his friends find out about his secret admirer, Arthur gets a lot of teasing.  At one point, he thinks that he knows who the secret admirer is, but when he writes a valentine of his own for her, it turns out that he’s wrong, and it leads to more embarrassment.

However, Valentine’s Day isn’t over yet. Arthur’s secret admirer gives him a movie ticket, saying that she’ll meet him at the theater.  With this last message, Arthur realizes who is secret admirer is and arranges a surprise of his own.

This is just a fun, cute Valentine’s Day story, part of the Arthur Adventure Series.

Posted on by TracyC

Edward the Emu

Edward the Emu by Sheena Knowles, illustrated by Rod Clement, 1988.

Edward the Emu lives in a zoo, but he finds it boring.  He is so bored that he decides to try living with and acting like the other animals. 

First, he envies the seals who live in the pen next to his and always seem to be swimming and having fun.  So, one night, he jumps out of his pen to join the seals.  The next day, he hangs out with the seals, lying in the sun and balancing a ball on his nose.  It’s much more fun than his boring old pen, but then he overhears a zoo visitor say that the lions are “the best thing to see at the zoo.”

Edward once again switches pens, deciding that he’ll try to be a lion.  He spends the next day growling and snarling while the lions roar.  It’s a lot of fun, but then another visitor comments that he likes snakes the best. 

Once again, Edward switches pens and tries being a snake.  This time, someone comments about great emus are.  Feeling better about himself, Edward decides to return to his own pen. 

However, to Edward’s surprise, there is another emu in his pen, his replacement because he disappeared!  It’s not a problem, though, because the new emu, Edwina, is glad to see him, and Edward is less likely to be bored now that he has a friend.

A friend sent me this cute picture book from Australia.  The story is told in rhyme, and the pictures of Edward trying to be different types of animals are fun.